It was to be the first of several visits I would make to the Interrogation Centre, and at the end of each one I hoped it would be my last. Later on I would read about the imprisoned Nguyen Tai, the most senior North Vietnamese officer ever captured, who after years of physical torture was kept in a sealed white box with twenty-four-hour bright lights and powerful air conditioning turned up high. The memories of my visits stay with me, despite my attempts to shut them away, and flourish into new life with every image of Guantánamo and Abu Ghraib that flickers across my television screen. But it was no one of such high status as Nguyen Tai that Donovan took me to see, even though this captive too was educated and fluent in French. An agent freshly captured in the Cholon district after being recognised in a night market by a defector, and I don’t know if it is part of my reluctance to remember but his name is wiped from my memory even though his face is unblurred. He had gone through the inevitable process of denying who he was and hanging on to his assumed identity and carefully constructed background until confronted face to face by some of the very people he had trusted most. I sat in the corner of the room and stared at this first human representative of the enemy we had tried and failed to defeat.

He was probably in his early thirties, wore what looked like home-made rubber sandals, a stained white shirt and black shorts, his hair matted and unkempt – it seemed difficult to associate our military failure with this hunched, forlorn figure. He looked at me once after Donovan had sat down at the table opposite him. I met his eyes and then he looked back to Donovan. What passed between us in that moment? I think of it from time to time and know now that we never saw each other at all but instead saw what the vagaries of fate, which had cast us on a particular side of the line, conditioned us to see, and I do not know if he survived the horrors of that place. If he did, am I even a tiny spot, ingrained in the foulness of his memory? And I do not want to be there in his, or he there in my own, but do not, even all these years later, have the means to erase its existence.

Donovan was quiet, making a play of reading everything in the file before him, barely looking at the man in front of him, sniffing from time to time and then, when he had finished, he leaned back in his chair and smiled. For a second he resembled nothing so much as a doctor with his first patient of the day and, as if to accentuate that impression, there was an air of beneficence about him, a calm, almost languid body language, and I wondered whether, to obtain whatever it was that he wanted, he might not simply lean across the table and whisper in the prisoner’s ear. Instead he made a fuss about having the cuffs removed and then offered him a cigarette. The prisoner refused at first but Donovan persisted until one was taken and a fug of smoke enveloped both their heads.